On this date in 1834, James Gibbons, who became a leading figure in the Roman Catholic Church, was born to Irish immigrants.

Ordained as a priest in 1861, Gibbons served during the Civil War as a volunteer chaplain at Fort McHenry. In 1877, the Baltimore-born Gibbons became the head of the oldest archdiocese in the United States. Nine years later, Pope Leo XIII named him as the second-ever U.S. cardinal.

An ardent proponent of American civic institutions, Gibbons called the U.S. Constitution the finest instrument of government ever created. In his dealings with the Vatican, he and other “Americanizers” championed the separation of church and state.

Gibbons played a key role in the granting of papal permission for Catholics to join labor unions. “It is the right of laboring classes to protect themselves and the duty of the whole people to find a remedy against avarice, oppression and corruption,” he said. In 1887, he helped found The Catholic University of America in Washington and served as its first chancellor.

A frequent White House visitor, Gibbons knew every president from Andrew Johnson to Warren Harding. President William Howard Taft honored him for his humanitarian work at the 1911 golden jubilee celebration of his ordination. In 1917, President Theodore Roosevelt hailed him as “the most venerated, respected and useful citizen in America.”

After Gibbons’s death in 1921, Baltimore’s H.L. Mencken, who often heaped scorn on Christian leaders, wrote, “More presidents than one sought the counsel of Cardinal Gibbons: He was a man of the highest sagacity, a politician in the best sense, and there is no record that he ever led the Church into a bog or up a blind alley. He had Rome against him often, but he always won in the end, for he was always right.”

Today, numerous parochial schools across the United States bear his name.

Source: “The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons: Archbishop of Baltimore, 1834-1921,” by John Ellis (1952)